Modern computing devices have become ubiquitous tools for personal, business, and social uses. As such, many modern computing devices are capable of connecting to various data networks, including the Internet and corporate intranets, to transmit and receive data communications over the various data networks at varying rates of speed. To facilitate communications between computing devices, the data networks typically include one or more computing nodes (e.g., network switches, network routers, servers, other compute and/or store computing devices, etc.) to route communications (i.e., network packets) from a source computing device to a destination computing device. Certain network infrastructures, such as data centers, may include tens of thousands or more of such computing nodes. To handle such large network infrastructures, adaptive routing technologies have evolved using topology information of the network infrastructure. Traditional methods to determine the topology of the network infrastructure may include one or more of the computing nodes identifying neighboring computing nodes (e.g., those computing nodes that are one hop from the identifying computing node) using static topology information, which cannot typically be applied to the adaptive routing technologies.
Accordingly, round-trip times between computing nodes can be used to augment the topology information and provide a better view of the network as a whole. Network round-trip time estimation has been extensively studied and implemented in the context of transmission control protocol (TCP) (e.g., Karn's algorithm), where round-trip time is a critical measurement that establishes protocol timeout values. In support of such round-trip time estimation, some network hardware (e.g., Ethernet network cards) can provide timestamps in hardware. However, in high-performance computing devices, such capabilities are not always available (i.e., the hardware is not capable of providing timestamps). To overcome the timestamp deficiency, some implementations use a software ping-pong benchmark to estimate round-trip times. However, such methods generally introduce software overhead attributable latencies that can be an order of magnitude larger than the network latency being measured.